Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Window on Eurasia: Support Grows for Establishing a Third Russian Capital in Siberia

Paul
Goble

Staunton, March 20 – Ninety-five
years ago this week, Vladimir Lenin shifted the Soviet capital from Petrograd
to Moscow in order to protect his regime. In the last decade, Vladimir Putin
has shifted certain central government functions back to Petersburg to reward
his native city which has always defined itself as the country’s “northern
capital.”

Now, an ever-growing chorus of
Russian commentators and even politicians is suggesting that many of the
Russian Federation’s current difficulties could more effectively addressed if
the country were to create a third capital east of the Urals or at the very
least transfer some functions currently being performed in Moscow.

Yesterday, the Rex news agency, which was
created by Modest Kolerov, noted that “proposals about shifting the capital to
Siberia or returning it to St. Petersburg, at least to disperse Moscow agencies
beyond the ring road to several cities of Russia are constantly being made” in
recent years (www.iarex.ru/interviews/34842.html).

Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch, said
in 2009 that the only way to struggle successfully with corruption is to shift
the capital to Yekaterinburg or Novosibirsk. “Peter I was forced to flee Moscow
because the expenses of the bureaucracy even in his era were burden on the
development” of the country.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of
the LDPR, said a year later that he supported the idea and that the capital
city should be closer to the geographic center of Russia, perhaps in Samara,
Perm or Yekaterinburg.Then, the
outspoken politician said, Moscow could be “cleansed” and become “a trade
center like New York” while “Orenburg would become Washington.”

Defense Minister Shoygu said in 2012
that he believes the capital should be “moved somewhere farther way, to
Siberia. Eduard Limonov, a leading opposition figure, said in the same year
that “the capital should be “to shifted to Southern Siberia,” tying that region
to the rest of the country and “reducing the load on the European part of
Russia.”

Duma Deputy Viktor Zubaryev somewhat
earlier called for putting it in Krasnoyarsk, a place he said was the capital
of a kray that is Russia “in miniature.” That would benefit everyone because
there “there are no nationalist attitudes, and the people who live in the
region have instead a Siberian character.”

But Vyachesla Glazychev, whom the
news agency describes as “one of the most authoritative urbanists,” dismissed
the idea out of hand, saying that the country should instead adopt a project to
build “a greater Moscow” rather than engage in proposals to move the capital
which he suggested were simply “a late April fools’ joke.”

To determine whether such ideas are
rational or not and to consider what are the “pluses and minuses” of any shift,
the Rex news agency asked several other urbanists for their views.Most were quite positive, but all were
somewhat more cautious than the political figures just mentioned.

Lev Vershinin, a historian, said
that he backed the idea because he is convinced that the political capital and
the economic capital should be separated, that “under current conditions, the
further Versailles is from Paris, the better.

Valentin Grinko, another historian,
said the country would have to think about what such a shift would mean because
Moscow and especially the Kremlin are “the archetypes” of Russian power now and
any shift in the capital would have enormous consequences, for some people good
ones and for others bad.

And Grigory Trofimchuk, the first
vice president of the Moscow Center for Modeling of Strategic Development,
suggested that “the capital and brand” of Russia should remain where they are
but the bureaucrats should be sent elsewhere.That wouldn’t cost nearly as much as building a new capital from
scratch.

Summing up, Sergey Sibiryakov, who
head the Rex international expert group, said that shifting the capital to
Siberia would indeed solve a large number of problems. But it wouldn’t change
the nature of power in its essence because the same people would be involved
and they would take their way of doing business with them.

Moreover, “the entire structure” of
the country’s defense is based on the defense of Moscow.If the capital were to be moved, the defense
structures and Russian strategic thinking would have to change.That would involve potentially prohibitive
costs. But that is not the end of the story, he suggested.

According to Sibiryakov, Moscow
should remain the center of “executive power” but only that. No firms should be
built or registered there. They should remain in the provinces. That would make
the latter richer, reduce the city as a draw for gastarbeiters, and eliminate
much of the envy non-Muscovites feel for their capital.